Quentin Tarantino Describes The 'Star Trek' Movie He'd Make

In a talk with the Nerdist podcast, Pulp Fiction and The Hateful Eight director Quentin Tarantino shared how he would boldly go into the Star Trek universe: by re-purposing classic Star Trek episodes into features.

"I would be more inclined to do a Star Trek kind of thing rather than Star Wars," Tarantino said. "I haven't considered considered it, like I'm going to do it, but I did web spin a little bit about the idea."

"They might have trapped themselves a little bit by the simple fact they have to use all the crew now," Tarantino said of Paramount's rebooted Star Trek movie series, which consisted of 2009's Star Trek and 2013's Star Trek Into Darkness at the time of the 2015 interview. "In all the films they've established it so much, that you need Uhura, you need a Scotty, you need Bones, you need all that stuff going on all the time — everybody has to be represented in some big story where they all have to deal. Where I actually think it could be cool — 'cause some of those episodes are fantastic, and the only thing that limited them was their sixties budget and eight days shooting schedule, and even having said that they did a magnificent job — but you could take some of the great, classic Star Trek episodes and just easily expand them to 90 minutes or more and really do some really amazing, amazing stuff."

"The obvious one would be The City on the Edge of Forever," Tarantino said, referencing the 28th episode of Star Trek: The Original Series' first season that saw Captain Kirk and Spock journeying back in time after Bones inadvertently disrupts history. "That's what everyone would go to, but there's a reason why everyone would go to that! It's one of the classic stories of all time. And one of the great time travel stories."

"I think one of the best episodes of Star Trek ever written was for [Star Trek: The Next Generation]," Tarantino said, singling out the season 3 episode Yesterday's Enterprise, where an Enterprise ship from the past breaks through a time rift and alters the course of history. "I actually think that is not only one of the great space stories, but the way it dealt with the mythology of the whole thing — that actually could bare a two hour treatment."

"Because the whole thing with that episode that was so cool, they save the ship, but little do they know by saving the ship it's actually in a different time period — but they don't know that," Tarantino said. "But what ends up happening is — because they screwed up with the timeline, everything changes. The characters don't know it, but we know it. And the thing about it is, it turns out that the Klingons and the humans on earth have been having this hundred year war that's been going on, and it's just the bloodiest war imaginable in the history of any universe."

There you have it: if Tarantino tackled a Star Trek movie, it'd likely be character-focused and involve time-travel. (And maybe involve the most violent war in the history of the universe, enduring for more than a century.)

Star Trek returns to the small screen with the new CBS All Access Original Series Star Trek: Discovery, hitting the streaming service September 24.

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